This is not just a journal, it’s a survival guide for broken men and hopefully a comfort so you know you’re not the first to get fucked over.

It took me 5 weeks to adapt from the comfort of a house to this extended foxhole in the Wicklow Mountains.  

6 weeks to stop missing my monthly shag with the bitch with spectacular tits who charmed me into putting a wedding ring on her witch-like finger.  

7 weeks to realise that love is a drug that takes over your life; separates you from friends, family and interests. 

(Survival tip: find someone you get along with, not someone dazzling who takes over your life).

8 weeks to erase the sound of her family’s voices patronising me about having no family support before sticking the knife in about me being too introverted to be anything but a loser. 

9 weeks to give up on thoughts of getting everything back that I worked my arse off for and become content with misery. 

10 weeks to notice crows have watched me since I arrived.  

The daily whistling of eroelastic flutter as a pigeon takes flight. This announces the arrival of carrion crows. Matt kicks off his mummy sleeping bag, shoves his journal into a pocket of his camo shorts, explores again deep valleys in his ribs with his thinning fingers, crouches towards the entrance, pushes aside the repurposed half-shed door and stretches the aches and stiffness from his back. Crows swoop playfully through a haze of glistening rainbow-coloured mist painting the pine forest. He yawns with the relief that there’ll be no Range Rover making daily drive-bys in the valley below looking for smoke. Using his Zippo, he lights a handful of Old Man’s Beard, places it into a charred two-foot wide hole in the ground and puts twigs and sticks on top. 

“You’re not homeless, you’re off the grid,” he reminds himself.  “This is the life. True fucken freedom.” 

With his shins warming, he opens his journal: ‘A Broken Man’s Survival Guide’ and  amends what he’s written with more bracketed survival tips.

Oak gives off very little smoke. (The dryer the better.) And a good thick shelf of living ferns,  preferably above a camp dug into heavy undergrowth, dissipates smoke long before it reaches the forest canopy. 

(Spend time finding camps like this one so you won’t be humiliated. Make sure it’s difficult to access.)

He places a rusty silver moka pot onto a black crusty grill over the fire hole as he reads quietly to himself.

Coffee takes ten minutes over a Dakota Fire Hole. Make sure the ventilation holes can feed it enough oxygen. 

(Winter survival tip: Burrow a hole inside your den connected to the fire pit to survive the coldest months.)

It takes about 5 hours for the sun to cross a 15-metre open section, enough to charge a phone even in cloudy weather. 

(Don’t look at old photos of your life!)

As the hot sun moves overhead, he sets up the fold-out solar panel on the open ground beneath a sunroof in the tree canopy. Crow chatter draws his gaze to the thick mesh of pine branches on the steep slope behind camp, where he spots the young crow he was expecting.  “Morning Geronimo.”

16 weeks to feel something again anytime a black pearly eye looks deep into your soul and blinks away the pain. 

(They’ll help you to quit moping, if you’re like me, stop beating yourself up over a fight with the only employer that gave time off for emotional damage.)

“Fuck!” Two young crows fly into the tree tops but quickly return to their branch and huddle. “Geronimo, you found a mate,” he mutters and lifts himself. “So it must have been you that left me the trinkets this time.”

It took me about 4 months to notice the little gifts crows leave. An unusual stone that wasn’t there yesterday. A piece of Lego. A corroded gold necklace and locket.

The newest crow is young with tattered feathers. A grim, neglected looking thing. “I’m going to name you Morrigan. Hopefully you’ll scare off would-be visitors.”

Crows are good friends but aloof.

(Not so fun fact: Morrigan was an Irish mythological figure associated with war, death and doom who appeared as a crow.)

He reads aloud to them:

“In winter, crows will look at you differently. They’ll get so hungry your eyeballs will look like a nourishing food source.”  He laughs. “Hopefully you’re as fortunate as me in getting to save a baby crow fallen from its nest, and for its parents to adopt you as their worm-fetching pet.”

“Huh Geronimo,” he says, looking deeper into the still forest for its parents, who’ve been missing a few months.

Dancing down the swaying pine branches, Geronimo leaves Morrigan and sits above in flickering sunlight. The acerbic smell of pine sap and bark is always pleasing to him in the mornings when wrapped in oak smoke, fresh coffee vapours and observed by a doting young bird. 

After throwing dried meat into a white-bread wrap, he stomps along the trail. The two young crows fly from branch to branch, watching him attempt to hunt. A glimpse of tan downy fur lifts his spirits and he runs to find a lifeless rabbit, its neck pinned to the ground in one of the traps.  “Not a rat for once.”

He returns to camp, puts the limp carcass at his feet and skins it. Other crows gather near the smallest of them, Geronimo, which Matt named for the way it jumps from branches and falls without opening its wings until the last moment. Geronimo lands close to his blood-speckled hiking boots. Eyeballing him, it hops sideways towards him, then away and back again as Morrigan lands and observes from a safe distance.  “This new love of yours is making you suspicious of me.”

Over the summer, Morrigan’s behaviour—a  matriarchal presence—becomes as layered as the others, and Matt keeps track of changes in the community’s patterns.

47 weeks to train crows to follow you away from their territory (they’ll do anything for fresh maggots.)

52 weeks to realise that a year has passed completely besotted with crows and they are with me.

Once Matt hears the landowner’s kids leaving the farm below, he can cycle up the rambler’s path without being seen. Morrigan follows Geronimo to the edge of the forest. They go no further. July heat rages beneath Matt’s shaggy hair and beard, his  body dripping a fever despite being worryingly fatless. Gale wouldn’t know the sight of him, he thinks. 

Intense feelings about his ex take him away from his planned trip to the supermarket. He veers left at the fork and freewheels down the long winding hill, through the two new housing estates towards Arklow Town. On an outskirt of wasteland, he climbs a two-story bank of dirt covered with broken furniture and cheap household appliances. He blows dirt from the binoculars’ glass. Adjusts both eyepieces and the central focus knob. 

Gale’s oiled D-cups glisten in the back garden. “Paid for by me.” 

As she talks on her phone, he groans with the shame of yearning to fondle the bullet nipples. He remembers being sickened by her virginal exhibitions in Arklow Town and her front-pew Sunday masquerades and long sessions in the confession box. 

His  two-bed semi forces a bulge in his eyes. “A decade-and-a-half of wasted labour and love.” He considers riding down, taking a shovel from the shed and beating her to death. “Probably talking to that Garda prick she was riding. I’d bury them both in me hole if she…” he mutters, trailing off. 

He could barely raise his voice to accuse her. Never had the notion until after she kicked him out for ‘physical and emotional abuse’. In court, he agreed there had been times he was emotionally abusive; he couldn’t find the words to describe how she had twisted him into a ball of confused agitation. 

“You let a thick bitch get to you, you loser,” he says, skulking away.

Midday sun frenzies beneath his skin. As he cycles past a quiet farm, housed in a rusted corrugated shed, he notices the pink skin of pigs. He sneaks in and wrestles a piglet. Slipping, squealing and snorting, he hacks at its throat with his blunt Bowie knife until it’s slit. Covered in blood, he hauls it back to camp inside his bike pannier and lays it out on a slab of flat rock. 

That night, dreams are haunted by bullet nipples, skinned rabbits and little curly tails. 

The whistle of pigeon wings. 

He hops from the foxhole to see pink flesh tanning under the sun and crows hopping around the piglet. An eyeball is plucked out and devoured in one. Both eyeballs go in a blink.

“Jaysus, morning Morrigan. Hungry I see.” 

If you can, befriend carrion crows. These birds once appeared on battlefields after wars to snack on the flesh of dead soldiers, hence the name. They are mostly solitary, or found in pairs.

59 weeks to train carrion crows to form a murder (the ‘poetically’ collective noun for a group of them) and follow you from their forest home, which they never leave.

Matt creeps towards his old back fence, the housing estate dead quiet due to the Bank Holiday fate in town. In the garden, a small radio plays ‘Little Lies’ by Fleetwood Mac. “That’s fucken apt.”

The crows watch on from power lines, Geronimo tuned to his every movement. 

Suntan lotion fragrances the air; Gale’s golden glistening skin homogenous but for a thin landing strip of ginger pubes, which lines up with the gap in the fence that Matt peeks through. 

He grumbles quietly that he had painted the fence two years before, “Cuprinol Ducksback. 5 fucken year guaranteed,” as he pines over her bullets.

“Are ye gonna do your thing or what?” he whispers, to Morrigan above him.

The birds remain still and quiet.  “Go on,” he whispers, waving Geronimo down. “Yous love an eyeball. There’s an oiled pig baking under the sun over there.”

Geronimo looks away as if appalled by the suggestion.

“What type of crows are ye?”

“Who’s there?” Gale stands, a book by her side, bullets on show to impress ‘Dickhead’, the Dublin Garda sergeant who moved in three doors down four years earlier. Gritted teeth and growling, Matt eyeballs the guard’s house, curtains pulled and not a twitch in them. She had coerced the hornball into being her character witness in court. He claimed Matt was an angry far-right psychopath due to Matt’s strong views against filling local hotels with all male, undocumented migrants of fighting age. 

Refugees me arse. Most of them were con men and criminals who ripped up their passports on the way here. Only in Ireland for leggy women, state-sponsored abortions, free houses, “And free money,” he says, consumed by the emotions that made Gale look like the victim of a madman in court. 

She arrives at the fence. “Who’s there? Matt, is that you?”

“No… no, it’s the binman.”

“It is you.” She pulls open the gate. “The state of ye.” She raises the hardcover book and beats him. “You pervert. Grow up. Why couldn’t you be a man?”

Matt is composed; takes her hits like usual. 

Above her, the crows squawk and flap.

Smack. “You’re such a loser. Just fucking grow up.” Whack. 

Geronimo jumps, wings tucked and swoops away from Gale at the last minute, snags her hair, pulling out a clump. 

 “Pervert. Dirty little pervert. Just grow up.” She swings aimlessly, batting the bird to the ground. Morrigan falls, catches flight, circles anxiously before flapping in Gale’s face. 

“Oh Jesus, get it off.”

Matt watches unmoved. The tattered bird sinks its grey talons into Gale’s cheeks. Five thin streams of blood pour down over the bullets. She drops the book. The bird stops pecking as if to enquire if Matt recommends this delicacy. He nods, grins wildly. 

Gale’s screams are momentary. One eye is pecked at, softened up, before plucked from her head. Swallowed whole. The other comes out dexterously and is dropped. 

Crows soar down as Gale flails blindly, swatting Matt. He falls easily, lies in a ball, feigning injury. Geronimo disengages hunger and leads an assault towards Gale. The black foul gang swarms her. Pecking. Feral. Relentless until seeping effusions bubble out of her glistening body, pooling on the grass. 

She twitches, semi-conscious as Matt casually sits on his old deck chair. It’s no longer shaped to comfort his cavernous arse, he thinks as he watches his friends feast and takes out his journal. 

After writing his final entry, he tears out the page and looks up at the guard’s window.

“Good luck making the murder charge stick in court, Dickhead,” he says, turning back to the page.

Turns out it only takes 60 weeks to train a murder of carrion crows to care enough about you that they’ll kill your adulterous bitch ex-wife.